On Tuesday, six people will be voluntarily locked into a cloister of cramped, hermetically sealed tubes woven inside a Moscow research facility the size of a high school gymnasium. They will eat dehydrated food, breathe recycled air and be denied conversation with practically everyone else but one another.

And they must stay inside for 105 days.

In a small step in the direction of Mars, the international crew is embarking on a simulated flight to the planet to test the limits of human tolerance for the isolation and monotony of interplanetary travel.

“It is really like a real space flight without the weightlessness and the danger to our lives,” said Sergei N. Ryazansky, a cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission. “On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it’s the science of sensory deprivation.”

Called Mars-500, the Russian-led project based at the Institute for Biomedical Problems here will culminate in a 520-day simulation beginning early next year of a complete manned mission to the planet — a time frame that incorporates launching to Mars touchdown and back — that scientists hope will edge humanity a little closer to that next giant leap.

It sounds a little crazy, but maintaining crew sanity for a year-and-a-half trip is at least as important and perhaps even as daunting as the engineering challenges of making such a trip technically possible.

The bar association is, after all, a private trade association, not an arm of the government. It takes public and generally liberal positions on all sorts of divisive issues. And studies suggest that candidates nominated by Democratic presidents fare better in the group’s ratings than those nominated by Republicans.

I’m sure that couldn’t possibly be because Republican presidents are more likely to nominate ideological hacks, nooo.

In reality, the Republican who has accomplished the most in the early stages of President Barack Obama’s administration is Rep. Eric Cantor, the buttoned-down minority whip who marshaled the House GOP’s unanimous opposition to the $787 billion Democratic stimulus package in February.

During the George W. Bush era, Gingrich rose quietly from the ruins of his failed crusade to impeach President Bill Clinton, trying to transform himself from a Republican pariah into a voice of conscience for the badly demoralized conservative movement. The religious right elements that helped orchestrate Gingrich’s downfall as Speaker of the House became the catalyst for his resurrection and may now propel him into contention for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. But winning them over has not been easy. Before earning a seat at their table, Gingrich has had to confess his darkest sins and beg for redemption, first on the radio show of his former nemesis, James Dobson, and then before a priest at St. Joseph’s Rectory, a Catholic church on Capitol Hill.

Indeed, on Sunday, March 29, Gingrich will have converted to Catholicism, the faith of his third wife, Calista Bisek. Though the ceremony was announced without fanfare, leading Catholic conservatives like Deal Hudson are brimming with excitement. Hudson was the most important Catholic political advisor to President Bush and Karl Rove, founder of the seminal Catholic journal, Crisis magazine, and self-described “theocon,” contends that Gingrich’s conversion represents more than a concession to his wife; it signals a dramatic break from the past, both personally and politically.

“From a Catholic point of view,” Hudson told me, “Newt’s sins no longer exist–they’ve been absolved. He’s made a fresh start in life. So Newt will continue to sin and confess but there aren’t going to be a lot of Catholics who will hold that against him. They understand why being a Catholic makes a difference.”

Awesome. So I guess if, say, Bill Clinton converted to Catholicism, he would be similarly absolved, right? Or would it be conditional on him becoming an anti-choice, anti-gay crusader?

Today on Glenn Beck’s radio show, Bachmann declared that the U.S. will soon be moving to “give up the dollar as our currency and we would just go with a One World currency.” Such action, she warned, would mean the U.S. as a country would be “no more”:

(…)
BACHMANN: What that means is all of the countries in the world would have a single currency. We would give up the dollar as our currency and we would just go with a One World currency. … If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom. And then we are no more, as an exceptional nation, as we always have been. So this is imperative.

Bachmann claimed that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he was “open” to the One World currency. (In reality, he only said he was open to changes in the IMF special drawing rights, and reaffirmed his commitment to the dollar.) Beck warned that speaking out about the global currency gets one labeled a “kook,” but Bachmann brushed off such concerns, saying she’s been called that “throughout [her] political career”:

BACHMANN: Well, Glenn, I have experienced that throughout my political career, being labeled a kook. It just happened again in a big story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. But all we have to do is point to the treasury secretary on tape, on camera. This is not Michele Bachmann being a kook. This is our treasury secretary on tape and on camera.

Man, I’d hate to see what Michele Bachmann being a kook would look like.

It’s plant food … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? … So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

It has happened — IT! YOU KNOW OF WHAT WE SPEAK. Jonah Goldberg and Kathryn Jean Lopez have officially merged to become the ultimate destructo-bot of carnage and murder and death as foretold by ancient prophecy: The Fat Mexican Secretary. For there is currently a column by “Jonah Goldberg” on National Review called “Big Bedfellows,” and there is also currently a column by “Kathryn Jean Lopez” on Townhall called “Big Bedfellows,” and they’re the same article about how they fuck all the time, maybe.

PROOFERY:

I think there’s a perfectly innocent explanation for this. I think it might have gone down something like this:

“Okay, I posted that op-ed you sent me – who did you say it was by again?”

Rush Limbaugh, mocked as “Jabba the Nut” by free weekly Boston Phoenix, has been selected as the ugliest man of the year by the paper. The 99 runner-up unsexiest men of the year can be viewed at this link.

“America’s ugliest moment of 2009? Rush Limbaugh, his man-boobs a-jiggle, bouncing at the CPAC podium to bask in the sickly glow of conservatism’s orgy of greed, avarice, and arrogance,” the paper writes. “Here, at last, was the shining image of the 21st century Republican Party: a leeringly rich Baby Boomer squatting at the top of the mountain, reaping his jollies from the suffering of those at the bottom, praying for the failure of hope.

“If this hypocritical and morally repugnant reformed Oxy junkie wants to discuss “failure,” maybe we should talk about his career as an NFL commentator — or the last time he detoxed off prescription smack,” they add.

(…)

The paper explains, “To the masses, unsexiness is defined in superficial ways — pores big enough to drive Hummers through, and hair that grows like kudzu in unwanted places, and unexplained protuberances. Think Danny Bonaduce or Carrot Top (or virtually any man you can think of with red hair). To the faceless myrmidons here at Phoenix Unsexy Headquarters, however, unsexiness is an altogether different quality, defined instead by gypping jillions out of charities or punching your girlfriend or yelling at your cinematographer.”

“Our annual survey of the year’s Unsexiest Men is a corrective to this sort of deplorable behavior,” the Phoenix editors write. “Assembled by a watchful team with a low tolerance for hypocrisy, wastefulness, and unfunny comedians, our list holds men accountable for their rampantly unsexy ways. Consider this list a compendium of social subpoenae from the High Court of Sexiness.”

Challenging head-on the powerful private insurance and pharmaceutical industries, Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a single-payer health reform bill, the American Health Security Act of 2009 (.pdf), in the U.S. Senate Wednesday. The bill is the first to directly take on the powerful lobbies blocking universal health reform in the Senate since Sen. Paul Wellstone’s tragic death.

(…)

Highlights of the bill include the following:

Patients go to any doctor or hospital of their choice.

The program is paid for by combining current sources of government health spending into a single fund with modest new taxes amounting to less than what people now pay for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.

While federally funded, the program is to be administered by the states.

By eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private, investor-owned insurance industry, along with the burdensome paperwork imposed on physicians, hospitals and other providers, the plan saves at least $400 billion annually – enough money to provide comprehensive, quality care to all.

Community health centers are fully funded, giving the 60 million Americans now living in rural and underserved areas access to care.

Sigh. I wish the bounds of what is politically possible were not defined by what powerful industries will allow. ‘Cuz, and I know this will be a shock to a lot of people, the corporations do not actually have the country’s best interests at heart.

Simon Johnson has a long but excellent piece in the Atlantic, talking about America’s economic situation from an IMF perspective.

To sum up, the US fell into the same lazy trap that typically characterizes emerging-market countries – namely, allowing the corporate/financial sector to capture the government to give themselves permission for risky, reckless behavior that imperils the economy, and to block the substantive reforms needed when their gambles all go to hell.

It’s great stuff, and you should read the whole thing. I expect that kind of narrow-minded stupidity from Republicans, but it’s beyond disappointing when a Democrat lets the same corporations-must-always-win ethos guide his recovery plan, when the surest path to recovery is to let some corporations lose.

Plaintiffs in this civil rights action are three teenage girls and their parents. The Defendant, Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick, has threatened to prosecute the three girls for child pornography for their roles in the creation of two digital photographs unless the parents agree to place the girls on probation and send them to a five-week, ten-hour re-education program wherein the girls must discuss why their conduct was wrong and what it means to be a girl. One photo shows Marissa and Grace, from the waist up, lying side by side in their bras, with one talking on a telephone and the other making a peace sign. The other photo shows Nancy Doe standing upright, just emerged from the shower, with a white towel wrapped tightly around her body just below the breasts. The two photographs, which depict no sexual activity or display of pubic area, are not illegal under Pennsylvania’s crimes code and, indeed, are images protected by the First Amendment.

Skumanick nevertheless persists in threatening to prosecute the girls because he has deemed the photos “provocative.” Since there is no basis to prosecute the girls for posing in photographs that plainly are not child pornography, in terms of content or production, Skumanick’s threat to prosecute the girls must be considered retaliation against the plaintiffs for asserting their constitutional rights – the parents’ right to direct their children’s upbringing and the girls’ rights both to free expression and against compelled speech – in refusing Skumanick’s demands. Accordingly, plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief to enjoin Skumanick from bringing the retaliatory criminal charges against plaintiffs based on their refusal to accede to his demand that they submit to probation and participate in the re-education program.

It appears that the only grounds for calling the photos “provocative” is Skumanick’s say-so:

One parent stood up during the meeting and asked how Skumanick could be prosecuting his daughter because, according to him, she was in the photograph wearing a bathing suit. Skumanick told the assembled crowd that she was posed “provocatively,” which made her subject to a child pornography charge.

In response to Skumanick’s comment, Marissa’s father stood up and asked who was deciding what was provocative. Skumanick replied that he was not going to argue and that he could charge all of the minors there that night but was instead offering them a plea deal. Skumanick also told Mr. Miller that, “these are the rules if you don’t like them, too bad.”

Awesome. If I’m reading the description of the Nancy Doe photo correctly, I can see where that’s a little borderline, but calling a photo with zero nudity or sexual activity “child pornography”? And using that to threaten 13-year-old girls with prosecution? That’s insane.

This guy sounds like an unhinged misogynistic crusader who’s about two drinks away from screaming that teenage girls are dirty little whores who tempt the righteous into sin.

Chimpanzees share many of our genes, but dogs have lived with us for so long and undergone so much domestication that they are now serving as a model for understanding human social behavior, according to a new paper.

Cooperation, attachment to people, understanding human verbal and non-verbal communications, and the ability to imitate are just a handful of the social behaviors we share with dogs. They might even think like us at times too, according to the paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Advances in the Study of Behavior.

(…)

Topal, who is based at the Institute for Psychology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, is one of the world’s leading canine researchers. He and his team argue that dogs should serve as the “new chimpanzees” in comparative studies designed to shed light on human uniqueness.

“In my view, pet dogs can be regarded in many respects as ‘preverbal infants in canine’s clothing,'” he said, adding that many dog-owner relationships mirror human parental bonds with children.

My money’s still on chimps as being far more human-like, but it’s certainly true that dogs are more integrated into our world, and probably have been for long enough that some sort of co-evolution with humans has occurred.

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor — among the unlikeliest attendees at a Britney Spears concert earlier this week in Washington — told CNN Thursday he went to the teen-dominated show for a political event, to “help the team.”

(…)

According to a Republican aide, Cantor was specifically raising money at the concert for his political action committee, ERICPAC. The event was hosted by the Truckers Association, which has a box at the Verizon Center, where Spears was performing.

(…)

“I hand it to the performer, she was something,” he said.

The congressman also said his daughter was “really mad” he did not bring her to the concert. “She had school that day, and the next, and I wasn’t going to bring her up here to miss it.”

So he goes to the Spears concert to “help the team,” but doesn’t take his Britfan daughter along? Niiiice.

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote.

Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

(…)

The marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. We trumpet our successes and ignore failures — or else attempt to explain that the failure doesn’t count because the situation changed or that we were basically right but the timing was off.

(…)

So what about a system to evaluate us prognosticators? Professor Tetlock suggests that various foundations might try to create a “trans-ideological Consumer Reports for punditry,” monitoring and evaluating the records of various experts and pundits as a public service. I agree: Hold us accountable!

Ah, accountability. So very valuable, and yet so hard to find. And its absence screws up everything. If we had a culture of accountability instead of a culture of impunity, we wouldn’t be in Iraq, we wouldn’t be illegally spying or rendering or torturing, and our economy wouldn’t be in the toilet.

We’ve turned into a country-sized version of the guy who plays Xbox and watches TV all day and eats nothing but ice cream and junk food, and just can’t understand why he can’t get a date or walk around the block without wheezing.

I sure hope so, ‘cuz it sounds way cool. Basically, it’s an electric car plan where you buy everything but the battery, and there’s an infrastructure with not just charging stations, but switching stations, where you can get a low battery swapped out quickly and completely rather than waiting for it to charge up.

I’m rooting for ’em, but I have no idea if it’s really feasible, especially on a national scale. That’s a lot of charging and switching stations to build, and they don’t even have a car yet.

While I’m very glad that Bernie has put a hold on this anti-regulation wanker who thought Gramm-Leach-Bliley was a good idea, it’s disappointing that Obama continues to nominate people who were part of the problem. Kinda hard to believe he has any plans to reform the status quo when he keeps hiring the people who created it.

Oh, and I’m totally looking forward to the part where Harry Reid rides roughshod over Bernie’s hold like he did to Dodd on telecom immunity.

Rep. [Michele] Bachmann made her most alarming statement just a few days ago. When asked on a radio show about President Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal to reduce carbon emissions, Bachmann exclaimed:

I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us “having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,” and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.

Rep. Bachmann has made good on her word and showed up outside the White House this morning, shotgun in hand, ready to start a revolution. To a press conference of three, Bachmann stated, “I have called upon thousands of loyal Americans to march here this morning, with whatever weapons they have on hand: butter knives, slingshots, silly string, water balloons… Anything that’s going to let the Washington Elite know that we are serious!”

By 10am, no other citizens had shown, so Bachmann decided to go it alone. She made it halfway over the gate before getting stuck. Security guards stood by for 15 minutes and watched her struggle before finally helping her down. They quietly confiscated her GI Joe toy rifle and let her go.

Rush Limbaugh pledged that he would help Bachmann dig a tunnel to the White House; however, he pledged this on his nationally syndicated radio show, somewhat ruining the element of surprise.

Glennzilla points out that unlike conservatives, progressive bloggers have stayed true to their principles by attacking Obama’s screwups instead of rationalizing them. Critics, not apologists or sycophants.

I wish we weren’t given so many opportunities, but I’m proud to be on the team that didn’t sell out its core values.

Doctors and researchers regularly rely on CT scanners to create images of body parts like brains, chests and knees. But an artist-turned-medical-student in Manhattan is using one such machine to peer into the meat and guts of cultural icons like the Big Mac, the Barbie and the iPhone, creating whimsical and occasionally creepy images.

Satre Stuelke, 44, said his aim was to penetrate the metal, plastic or organic interiors of pop objects and foods, asking people to “think about how things are constructed.”

Discussing the first lady’s visit to a Washington D.C. classroom last week, Bruce incredulously recalled Obama’s story about wanting to get A’s in school and called out her use of a “weird, fake accent.”

“That’s what he’s married to,” Bruce said. “…You know what we’ve got? We’ve got trash in the White House. Trash is a thing that is colorblind, it can cross all eco-socionomic…categories. You can work on Wall Street, or you can work at the Wal-Mart. Trash, are people who use other people to get things, who patronize others, who consider you bitter and clingy…”

What kind of horrible inhuman monster wants to apply herself and achieve success through sheer hard work and determination? Why, it goes against everything conservatives stand for!

Yes, she really did say it. No, the full context (mostly indignant squawking in the “What? What was THAT?” vein) doesn’t help. Ms. Bruce simply does not approve of Those People when they don’t know their place.

Appropriately enough, Bruce was guest-hosting for the woman who called Meghan McCain fat and then claimed that it was intended as a commentary about society’s unrealistic standards of feminine beauty.

I am also informed that the Obamas did not get where they are through hard work and determination, but solely through affirmative action. Riiiight. They’re both clearly lazy, incurious idiots who’ve had everything handed to them on a silver platter. Or am I thinking of someone else?